1324: Fury

I hate anger in all its forms — whether it’s directed at me, coming from me or going on around me.

I’m not entirely sure where this feeling comes from — perhaps there’s some sort of deep-seated trauma from some event in my past that I’m repressing — but it means I’ve always felt enormously uncomfortable whenever there’s any sort of anger present near me, whether “near” means physically close to me or simply within my frame of awareness thanks to the Internet.

I remember getting extremely upset any time my parents would have an argument when I was little. However much I was assured that it was a natural part of any relationship, it still always filled me with anxiety. I felt that same feeling of anxiety whenever I got angry at school — usually the result of being bullied — and fearing that I’d lose control. And I feel the same thing today whenever there’s anger around me — or coming from me. I get uncomfortable, restless — even physically shaky at times if I’m the one expressing anger — and I hate it.

Consequently, I find it increasingly difficult to deal with the seemingly-constant fury that comes from certain quarters of the Internet. If it’s not one thing, it’s another — there’s always something out there pissing someone off, and they always want to talk about it at great length, usually with some sort of public shaming involved. And I just can’t deal with it, frankly.

The natural response is, of course, to simply switch off, walk away or unfollow these people altogether but that brings with it a whole host of modern etiquette questions that we simply didn’t used to have to worry about. If I unfollow, for example, a Twitter user who is mostly a decent person but who occasionally descends into mouth-frothing zealotry any time certain topics come up — to what I consider an unreasonable degree, regardless of how valid their points are — what will they think of me? What do I say if I ask them why I unfollowed them, assuming they notice? Am I honest about it? Or do I make up some lie about that probably fictional Twitter bug that makes it “randomly unfollow” people every so often? (Oh shit, did I let the cat out of the bag? Sorry.)

I am overthinking this issue, I’m sure; if people make me uncomfortable, I should just take myself out of that situation and prevent myself from getting drawn into something that would make me even more uncomfortable. The consequences I worry about might not even happen at all; if they do, I just have to deal with them. The fact I’m unable to participate in some discussions as a result is probably a good thing in the long term — there are plenty of other things out there that I can engage with, so I should focus my attention on those rather than things that make me anxious or uncomfortable.

This self-indulgent stream of consciousness brought to you by Internet Rage. Now I’m off to go and play Corpse Party in bed. Good night.

1316: Get Hype

I’ve written about this on at least one occasion before, but the fact that Breaking Bad is on television again has reminded me of the curiously inverted effect that hyperbole has on me. In other words, the more people waffle on about how amazing something is, the less I want to pay any attention to it whatsoever. I’ve long since muted everything to do with Breaking Bad for this reason, as it’s completely dulled any enthusiasm I might have once had for something that is — by most accounts — very good.

Breaking Bad is a curiously extreme example of what I’m talking about. It’s doubly infuriating because everyone posting about it on social media is also being incredibly conscious of spoilers — Breaking Bad fans hate spoilers — and thus what we end up with at the time a Breaking Bad episode is broadcast is a string of tweets that say absolutely nothing. To be more precise, they tend to be nothing but a string of tweets of people going things like “OH MY GOD” and “WOW” which has absolutely no meaning whatsoever to those who aren’t watching the show.

Now, I’ll grant that Twitter provides a reasonably practical means for Breaking Bad fans to get together and discuss the show — or, more accurately, “react” to it in real-time — but it really doesn’t inspire anything like in-depth discussion, and thus I have to question the value of doing this, particularly as it has several knock-on effects: 1) people who don’t like Breaking Bad get pissed off 2) people who might have wanted to watch Breaking Bad at some point get fed up and decide they don’t really want to watch it until everyone shuts the fuck up about it and 3) the people who are actually watching Breaking Bad are only giving the show half their attention because they’re flip-flopping back and forth between the TV screen and their phone.

I tried the “livetweeting” experience a couple of years back when I got vaguely into The Apprentice. I picked up a few followers in the process and found some entertaining people, too, but it really wasn’t worth it; the number of people who got irritated at it didn’t really make up for the people I “met” in the process, and the interactions I was having with others who were “reacting” to the show in real time were superficial at best. I didn’t find it particularly valuable, in other words; certainly no more so than sitting around watching a show with friends in the same room, which is something I don’t tend to do — TV, for me, tends to be an accompaniment to something else (like eating dinner) rather than an activity in itself.

More than the fact I didn’t find it particularly valuable socially, though, I just found it frustrating to do — if I was tweeting while watching, I found myself unable to concentrate on what was going on on the screen, so eventually I gave up, much to the relief of my Twitter followers.

Ultimately, it’s your Internet; if you want to “ooh” and “aah” at Breaking Bad while it’s on, feel free — I simply reserve the right to mute your ass if you do it too much!

Grump over. Time to go to a pre-wedding celebration.

1298: Far from the Valley

Jeez. I am so glad I’m not reviewing mobile and social apps any more.

I know I’ve said this numerous times before, but I feel like every day I come across something even more offensively vapid and pointless that makes me want to punch everyone involved in the face for thinking it could possibly have ever been a good idea.

Today, I came across an app called “Kahnoodle.” Here it is.

Kahnoodle is a “relationship app” that, according to The Atlantic, “wants to make maintaining your relationship automatic and easy — as easy as tapping a button. Its options include sending push notifications to initiate sex; ‘Koupons’ that entitle the bearer to redeemable movie nights and kinky sex; and, of course, the love tank, which fills or empties depending on how many acts of love you’ve logged.”

Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

Kahnoodle isn’t the only app of this type, I might add. As the Atlantic piece linked above notes, “couples’ apps” have been around for a while now, and represent some of the most pointless implementations of social media I’ve ever seen: they’re social networks designed for just two people. I reviewed one a while back called either Couple or Pair (I forget which one it was, because they changed the name from one to the other, which made all the App Store reviewers of it disproportionately angry at the developers) with Andie, and we both agreed within a matter of seconds that it was an utter waste of time.

The reason that apps like Couple/Pair and Kahnoodle are utterly pointless, of course, are because there are infinitely better ways to do the same thing already available that don’t require their own dedicated app. You can privately message people via Facebook, Google, AIM, Skype, email, text message, What’sApp, Kik… hundreds of other potential apps, from which you can talk to, you know, other people as well as your partner.

Kahnoodle’s selling point is that it “gamifies” your relationship, and as we all know from listening to Silicon Valley startup tosspieces, “gamification” increases “engagement” and “brand awareness” or whatever bullshit they’re talking about this week. Because these apps, despite appearances, aren’t really about bringing people together and helping them communicate at all; they’re about building up a captive audience who can then be either advertised at or monetised straight up the bumhole — sometimes both, in some sort of hideous business double-penetration scenario.

I apologise for that mental image. But if you need to “gamify” your relationship in order to remember to have sex or whatever, then perhaps you should sit down and have a very serious talk with your partner, because I would suggest that’s a sign that Things Aren’t Going All That Well. A real-life relationship is not like The Sims, where you can get yourself out of the doghouse by grinding the Chat, Compliment and Joke options until the meter climbs out of the red.

Sigh. Anyway.

One of the big reasons the App Store, Google Play and its ilk are such frustrating places to browse these days are because there are so many of these ridiculous apps available that provide nothing of any particular worth to society. The few useful apps that are available for phones inevitably get buried under this torrent of digital sewage, leaving those who are making good things consistently frustrated at the fact their stuff can never get noticed. It’s not just in mobile games this is happening — it’s in all types of apps. I’ve pretty much given up looking at the App Store now — I use my phone for basic communication through Twitter, Facebook, email and the like, and only download something from the App Store if I know precisely and specifically what I’m looking for.

So good job, shovelware merchants; you’ve pretty much destroyed the concept of “discoverability” with your relentless pursuit of the crap. I hope you’re pleased with yourselves.

1283: Dislike

I find myself thinking more and more about deactivating my Facebook account. I realise that in this day and age doing such a thing is tantamount to unplugging yourself from The Matrix, but I really don’t feel there’s a lot of value there for me any more.

The thing that has stopped me from closing my Facebook account in the past is the fact that “it’s the only real means I have of staying in touch with certain people.” That may be true, but the real question is how often I actually speak to the people for whom the only means I have of reaching them is Facebook? I have a lot of doubling-up between Facebook and Twitter, and in the case of most of my “real-life” friends I have their phone numbers. If I want to make plans with someone, I’ll generally text them. If I don’t have their phone number, I’ll reach for Twitter. Facebook messages are frequently ignored.

The reason Facebook’s value has declined for me over time is because the social media landscape has changed. What was once a cool means of communication has been roughly shoved in the direction of “branding” and advertising. It’s obvious the moment you read anything in tech journalism about social media, whether it’s Facebook or the latest pointless mobile app that lets you manipulate photos no-one cares about in a slightly different way to all the other apps that let you manipulate photos no-one cares about. None of the press coverage about new social media apps has anything to do with people communicating with one another; it’s all about how brands can leverage their social graph and monetize their core demographics. It’s about how a seemingly innocent app that allows you to subtly manipulate photos no-one gives a shit about is actually a means of getting your “brand” in front of as many people as possible. It’s about “engagement”, “ROI” and “CPC”.

I don’t give a fuck. And I don’t want to be a part of it. I don’t want to be confronted with an ad for an app or game I don’t give a shit about before I see anything my friends have posted — which, nine times out of ten, I probably don’t give a toss about anyway. I don’t want to be continually confronted with “sponsored posts” festooned with comments from complete imbeciles who think telling an ad to “fuck off” will make it go away. And I really couldn’t give a flying honk what George Takei’s PR team (spoiler: that’s not George Takei writing those posts) saw on Reddit last week and is only now getting around to sharing with everyone on the Internet.

Even outside of “branding” and advertising, though, the way people use Facebook has changed, too. With more and more different types of post available, the service has become more of a means of simply broadcasting pointless, impersonal shit into the void of the Internet rather than a way to start discussions or have conversations. What was once a two-way discussion is now a largely one-way street. (I’m aware a blog is exactly the same, but at least a blog is under no illusions about what it is and is not; Facebook, meanwhile, has always marketed itself as some form of communication tool, when this is, in fact, a relatively minor part of its reason for existence these days.)

All this may be hypocritical, because I’ve been guilty of all of the above at one time or another. But that was a process of discovery and exploration, leading me to the realisation I’m at today: aside from Twitter, which genuinely is still a reasonably useful means of communication for me, most other forms of social media carry little value to me besides giving me something to fiddle with on my phone when small talk dries up and I don’t want to just sit there looking like some sort of mute twat.

I haven’t decided yet whether or not I’m actually going to close down my Facebook account, but now I don’t work reviewing awful, exploitative and, hell, just downright crap social games for a living, I have no real “need” for that particular ball and chain any more. I’m going to do some very serious thinking about whether Facebook has a place in my life any more in the next week or two, and come to a conclusion then. If you’ve been having similar thoughts to me, then I urge you to do the same. I have a strange feeling we’ll feel better without that particular annoyance in our lives.

1250: Anger Leads to Suffering

I’ve been back on Twitter for a little while. I know I said I wouldn’t, but for professional reasons, it made sense to have it as a means of communication now I’m on USgamer — I’ve already managed to get in touch with a number of different devs and write stories thanks to that bloody service.

Twitter remains infuriating, however, because people still don’t quite seem to get that 140 characters is not a good amount of space in which to have a discussion. You can spill over into more and more tweets and rant on and on, but as soon as you start spamming like that, people switch off.

The other thing that Twitter encourages is kneejerk, usually furious responses. Sometimes these are justified; other times, all they do is damage the perception of the people who are trying to make otherwise coherent arguments.

By far the most consistently-occurring issues that come up in my Twitter feed are matters relating to any and all of sexism, feminism and transphobia in particular. As I’ve said on numerous occasions in the past, I support the causes that these people are trying to forward: women are just as awesome as men and should be treated as such; a person is a person, regardless of biological sex and/or gender, and shouldn’t be treated as a second-class citizen based on prejudice; most importantly, just don’t be a dick.

However, where the people campaigning for these things lose me is in their behaviour when it comes to advancing their causes. I do not and will not believe that the best way to enact change is to get really fucking angry at something, mock people who don’t subscribe to your exact viewpoint and then publicly shame people repeatedly until they clam up and don’t want to say anything. That shit is viral — if you behave that way, people will see the way you act towards others, and that in turn will make them not want to engage in discussions we should all feel confident and good about having. In trying to further a cause of equality and encouraging oppressed minorities to stand up for themselves, in other words, you’re actually silencing people in the process. It doesn’t matter whether those people you silence are the “privileged” — usually white men — because all you’re doing is… doing what you want people to stop doing. Do you see where the problem is, here?

Most recently, Mike Krahulik of Penny Arcade attracted the ire of these particularly vocal people on Twitter by making some ill-advised and ill-informed comments about transgender people. This isn’t the first time he’s said something stupid, and it probably won’t be the last. I honestly believe he’s not saying these things from a position of genuine hatred; he’s just naturally a jerk towards a lot of people — and, as he notes in an apology on Penny Arcade, the first time these issues raised their heads he wasn’t even aware of many of them. To be fair to him for a moment here, I knew absolutely nothing about transgender people at all prior to this year, either; the subject simply hadn’t come up, so it’s not at all unreasonable to assume that he hadn’t come into contact with this particular group of people before and thus didn’t know the “appropriate” or “acceptable” ways in which to talk about them.

There’s a degree of common sense required here, of course, which Krahulik didn’t always display, particularly as the most recent incident was actually the second time he had run headlong into being perceived as “transphobic”, but for him to be immediately labelled a “bigot”, a “sexist” and outright insulted is, frankly, a little much. People don’t teach you these things. (Well, perhaps they do now; it’s a long time since I was at school and took a Humanities lesson.) And as such, when people are confronted with unfamiliar things, sometimes mistakes are made; things are said without thinking; sometimes offence is caused. The appropriate response to someone making a mistake is to point out that they made a mistake and then educate them so they don’t do it again in the future.

Key point: both the pointing out of the mistake and the education should be done in a calm, respectful manner that acknowledges ignorance isn’t the same as bigotry. If your first response to someone saying something that you believe is offensive is to start swearing at and insulting them, then of course they are going to get defensive and start flinging mud back at you rather than attempting to engage with you — particularly if they don’t understand what they did wrong in the first place, however silly that might seem to you as someone more well-informed.

It’s a natural response; look at how children respond to being yelled at as opposed to having positive behaviour reinforced, or calm explanations as to why the thing they were doing was inappropriate. These reflex behaviours continue well into adulthood for many of us; no-one likes to feel like they did wrong, so the more aggressively people shout and scream, the more the recipient of the ire will dig their heels in and just escalate the whole situation. In Krahulik’s case, this happened previously with the “rape culture/dickwolves” incident a while back — people yelled, he got defensive, discussion was shut down before it could begin — and again with this more recent incident.

There are a number of sad things about this whole situation. Krahulik could have had the opportunity to learn about part of culture he’s unfamiliar with, but the immediately aggressive response shut down any hope of rational discussion and education and caused him to get defensive. The aggressive response didn’t stop, either; it grew and grew into a seething ball of hatred, with people referring to him and his Penny Arcade partner Jerry Holkins (who had remained very quiet throughout this whole debacle — a sign which some saw as tacit approval of Krahulik’s actions) as “dicks” and other, far more spiteful terms. People started calling for boycotts of PAX. One indie developer even publicly pulled out of PAX’s indie showcase.

None of this had to happen, and it is not solely Krahulik’s fault that it did. He’s not blameless at all, no, but I place as much blame for the subsequent fallout squarely at the feet of the people who did the aggressive yelling, the swearing, the insults, the death threats as I do at the feet of Krahulik. This could have been an opportunity for everyone involved to grow; instead, it was just yet another sign that people like nothing more than a good fight rather than actually talking and educating one another. And I worry that serious damage has been done on all sides of this issue; there are no winners here.

The really sad thing, I think, is how much this sort of thing erects barriers between people. Every time I see something like this happening, I feel genuinely afraid to open my mouth for fear of saying something that will make everyone hate me; and that little nagging voice in the back of my head says “you’re not allowed to have an opinion on this; you’re a privileged white male”. I have seen how quickly people can turn on someone for one little thing that they said, and no-one will ever back down or attempt to understand or educate. It’s just shout, shout shout. It kills discussion. It kills education. And it achieves the absolute opposite of what many of these “social justice” types are supposedly fighting for; instead of promoting inclusivity and harmony, it sows discord and excludes people. We’re better than that.

So everyone, try a little harder to get along and understand one another, please.

1242: Sod Off, LinkedIn

I have a LinkedIn account. It is one of those things that people recommend you have. And yet I don’t think I have ever used it. Not for finding a job, not for “professional networking” and certainly not for socialising. In fact, I find the whole thing massively irritating.

The thing that irks me so much about LinkedIn is that the people who do actually use it are inevitably the sort of greasy smarmballs who refer to themselves as “entrepreneurs” and “gurus” (neither of those are jobs; sorry to burst your bubble) and run “startups”. They communicate exclusively in that particularly annoying brand of business-speak that gave us such awful additions to the English language as “monetise” and “leverage” used as a verb.

That’s not all, though. LinkedIn itself perpetually bombards you with emails about what’s “hot” on their network each week, and again, the articles linked to are almost certainly written by people who woke up one day, decided they were an expert on “business” and promptly started vomiting their thoughts all over the Internet.

This sort of thing occasionally spills over onto other social networks, particularly Google+, which appears to harbour a healthy number of LinkedIn refugees. You can spot one of these people’s posts a mile off — they’re inevitably an image post featuring some sort of “inspirational” image, and the accompanying text usually makes the person posting the image sound like they’re a 50-year old discovering Imgur for the first time.

But I digress.

No, I find LinkedIn utterly useless because no-one I have come into contact with on there appears to use it for… well, anything at all, really. I have a “professional network” that is, apparently, 236 “connections” strong, and yet I have never spoken to any of them on LinkedIn. Many of them I speak to daily on Twitter and Facebook, which leaves LinkedIn rather — if you’ll pardon the employment-related pun — redundant. The people I have as connections on LinkedIn who I don’t speak to daily on Twitter and Facebook are generally people whose mobile apps I might have reviewed once in the past, and this apparently makes me a “professional connection”, even if I slated their app for being shit. (I did that a fair bit; there’s a lot of shit out there.)

I find myself wondering why I keep an account open at that God-forsaken website, but everyone I mention it to seems to think that you “must” have a LinkedIn account these days, otherwise you’re some sort of unemployable nobody. I guess if nothing else it provides a reasonably convenient means of creating an electronic CV that can be easily shared with employers. The Recommendations thing is a good idea in theory, too — though the fact that they don’t show up on your “public” profile, only to people who have actually added you as a connection is irritating — but these appear to have been superseded by “endorsements” whereby people who remember to log in to LinkedIn every so often click through a few automatic prompts to confirm that yes, I do indeed have skills in “Facebook” and “iOS”, without even thinking about it.

Basically, LinkedIn represents all that is wrong with the social Web. It’s full of self-important imbeciles who believe they are the ones who know how the world works, and that everyone else is wrong. It’s utterly vapid and useless to 95% of the population, and the other 5% you probably wouldn’t want to speak to anyway.

So yeah. Fuck LinkedIn.

1191: Social Burnout

I’ve been thinking this for quite a while, as you’ve probably noticed from past posts I’ve made on the subject, but I’m beginning to feel completely burned-out on social media. Everything has to be social these days. Everything has to have little like buttons and little comment buttons and allow every denizen of the Internet to spew their ill-informed thoughts and opinions over it, or to share it pointlessly to Facebook.

Earlier today, I was distressed to discover that an official Pizza Hut app is coming to Xbox 360, presumably aimed at those people who find phoning, using a mobile phone app or using the Internet to order a pizza too easy and would instead prefer to do so by navigating the monstrosity that is the Metro interface. One line in the Polygon article about it — here — jumped out at me and kind of drove it home how “way too far” we’ve taken social media these days. Here it is:

“After submitting an order, users can share their choice with friends via Facebook.”

Why. Why. Why why whywhywhy would you want to do this?

Pizza Hut aren’t the only offenders in this regard, of course — Amazon offer a convenient facility to tweet or share on Facebook anything that you’ve just bought, as do a lot of other websites. You can even set up the PlayStation 3 and Vita to automatically share every purchase you make on PSN to Facebook. And every time I see this facility, I wonder why on Earth anyone would want to use it. But apparently people do.

This glut of auto-sharing is killing the original point of social media, which was to allow people to engage in conversations with one another by sharing things that were important to them. Now, it’s more like a convention of ADHD sufferers running around going “I JUST BOUGHT A PIZZA! LOOK AT THIS VIDEO OF A DUCK RUNNING! HERE’S A PICTURE OF A CAT! I’D SAY SOMETHING PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE BUT ‘SOMEBODY’ WOULDN’T LIKE IT!” rather than what I remember my early experiences with Facebook being like.

I vividly recall resisting signing up to Facebook in its early days, because everyone seemed to be doing it and I just couldn’t be arsed with it. When I eventually started using it, however, I was impressed to discover a site that was seemingly built for real-life friends. Any time I added someone to my friends list, I had to indicate how I knew them, and the other person had to verify that story. My profile was only visible in full to those whom I had marked as a friend, and there weren’t really any privacy settings to worry about. Stuff that was shared was the sort of stuff you’d share if you were actually in the same room with friends — what you’d been up to, some photos from your holiday, perhaps a longer piece of writing in the form of a “Note”. No games, no spam, no “I Fucking Love Science” posts. Just actual interactions. The Like button was there, but it didn’t have the all-encompassing power it has now, and people hadn’t really started using it as a substitute for actually saying things.

Now, though, with the proliferation of “LIKE IF YOU HATE CANCER, SHARE IF YOU LOVE KITTENS” posts, the signal-to-noise ratio is all out of whack, and people are used to posting tons of crap while simultaneously saying nothing of value. This has the side-effect of meaning that when you actually want a response from someone, it’s quite difficult to get one. The other day I attempted to find someone to take care of our pet rats while we’re on holiday in Canada; the only responses I got were jokey, non-serious ones, and within a couple of hours it had dropped off the face of everyone’s News Feed, never to be seen again… unless I were to slip Facebook $7 to “promote” it, of course.

Or take today, when I saw someone post an actual non-rhetorical question that needed an answer, and the first response was a “Like”.

Not helpful. At all. You “Like” my question? Great. Do you “Like” it enough to actually fucking answer it, perhaps? No? Then piss off. I’m not so desperate for validation that I count the number of “Likes” a particular post gets and see it as some form of brag-worthy e-peen.

That said, if you want to “Like” my new “K-On Girls Wear the Union Jack” fanart cover photo, feel free.

Sigh. I’m such a hypocrite.

I’ve been rediscovering forums recently — I was a member of a My Little Pony forum for a while before it shut down due to admin drama, and I’m currently taking some tentative steps into the RPG Maker community. While forums have their own issues — largely people being a little lawyerish about the community rules and regulations — I’m beginning to think they’re not such an outdated means of discussion as many seem to think…

1186: Don’t Hate

There’s a curious phenomenon in comments sections around the land. And that phenomenon is that it is seemingly the law that someone, somewhere, must hate everything. Actually, that’s badly phrased; I don’t mean that one person hates everything — though I’m sure there are people who do — but instead I mean that whatever the thing that has been posted, there will always be at least one person who dislikes it for some reason and is inevitably the sort of person who is very vocal about their dislike of it.

This seems to happen particularly frequently in sectors that already have passionate userbases, or in which the userbases are seen as being a “subculture” and/or outside the “norm” somehow. I’m thinking specifically of the video games and anime sectors here — and before you start on me, for all the massive steps forward these media have made in terms of mainstream acceptance over the last 20-30 years they are still indelibly tarred with the “geek” brush to one degree or another.

Today, I was exploring the RPG Maker community who, by all accounts, appear to be a fairly friendly and helpful bunch for the most part, as I’ve previously mentioned. I was curiously browsing through some of the other users’ projects in progress and came across a few interesting-sounding games. One of the users noted that they had submitted their game to Steam Greenlight, the process whereby a game can end up being sold on Valve’s popular PC gaming digital download storefront if it gets enough positive votes from the community.

The game, by all accounts, sounded interesting and unconventional, and something I’d be intrigued to play. It was an “artistic” game, for want of a better word, designed as a means for the author to show what it was like living with depression. The author said upfront on the site that it was a mostly-linear, narrative-centric experience with a lot of text, and made no apologies for this fact. (For people like me, the terms “narrative-centric” and “lot of text” are selling points, not things to be ashamed of!)

Sadly, the Greenlight comments section was less than supportive for various reasons, featuring disparaging remarks for everything from it being “another depression game” (oh, sorry, there have been so many of those) to dismissing it simply because it’s an RPG Maker game. I’ve made my feelings on the latter point quite clear in the past, but they bear repeating: if a tool is available to help someone realise their artistic vision, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t use it, regardless of how many other people are also using it. And besides, some of my favourite games in recent memory have been RPG Maker titles — Corpse Party, To The Moon, Cherry Tree High Comedy Club… all of them were made in earlier versions of RPG Maker that were considerably less sophisticated than the excellent toolset that is VX Ace.

But I digress. The point is that the comments section was filled with hate for the sake of hate rather than actually constructive feedback. The fact that the game in question (Actual Sunlight, I believe it was called) was “another depression game” and an RPG Maker project had nothing to do with its quality, or its “value” to the Steam community as a whole, and yet these things were used as reasons to reject it, without even bothering to check it out.

In the anime sector, it seems that it’s fashionable to hate on whatever the biggest name show is at the time. Most recently, this has been seen with Sword Art Online, which I found to be a rollicking good time with an astonishingly spectacular soundtrack, some memorable characters and an interesting, intriguing and pleasingly mature (for the most part, anyway) storyline. It was a good show, in short; while it perhaps wasn’t the most intelligent anime you’ll ever see, it was certainly far more than a dumb, formulaic show.

Perhaps not something everyone would want to watch, no, but certainly far better than the overly-negative comments that would appear on J-List’s Facebook page any time site owner Peter Payne posted a piece of artwork relating to SAO. (Granted, J-List’s Facebook page is a place where any time a picture of a vaguely attractive anime girl is posted, one specific user will always be along within three comments of the start of the thread to helpfully inform everyone that “[he] would fuck her”, so it’s perhaps not the best place to go for objective criticism, but still; you’d expect a community of Japanophiles such as the followers of J-List’s page to be a bit more enthusiastic about the things they supposedly like!)

I honestly don’t get why this happens, and it seems to happen a lot. Why waste your time on hate when there is so much stuff out there to get you excited? Wouldn’t you rather feel happy and intrigued by something than angry or upset?

1184: For the Love of God, Please Learn About Snopes.com

Hello, you, random acquaintance and/or friend of my parents on Facebook. Yes, you. The one who has been clicking “Like” and “Share” on everything from posts that imply you want cancer to kill everyone if you don’t click “Like” to posts that wilfully spread misinformation, such as accusations that Red Bull causes brain tumours, that baby carrots are saturated with chlorine, or that aspartame causes cancer, brain tumours and multiple sclerosis.

You know who you are.

I’d like to introduce you to a website. I’d like you and this website to become best friends. I would like you to go to this website any time you find yourself questioning the validity of something that someone else asks you to share. I would like you to check this website before you share the thing that someone asks you to share. And if this website informs you that the thing that someone asks you to share is not, in fact, true, please politely tell the person who asked you to share the thing about this website, and direct them to the relevant entry debunking the thing they asked you to share. (Conversely, if this website informs you that the thing that someone asks you to share is, in fact, true, feel free to share as you see fit, but please stop using quite so many exclamation marks.)

This website is called Snopes.com.

It may not look like much, but it has been around in one form or another since 1995, and has been debunking chain letters and other urban myths ever since. It is a valuable resource that has been proven on numerous occasions to be both accurate and reliable. Please use it.

The reason I bring this up is that the unpleasantness that accompanied the Boston Marathon yesterday has brought with it a number of stories that are complete fabrications, and which have nonetheless found themselves spreading at an alarming rate across all varieties of social media. There is a convenient page summarising all of the claims made about the Boston Marathon and the events which supposedly occurred there right here. Please read it. Please familiarise yourself with it. Please take note of which stories are completely false and/or based on inconclusive, unproven information. Please do not share stories which have been proven to be false, or which are based on inconclusive, unproven information.

You may feel that there is “no harm” in “raising awareness” of issues by sharing things like this, even if they are not true. Unfortunately, that is not the case. By polluting social media with falsehoods, it becomes difficult for people who are personally invested in an unfolding story such as the Boston Marathon bombings to determine what the facts really are. By polluting social media with falsehoods, you run the risk of causing considerable distress to these people who are likely already very emotional. By polluting social media with falsehoods you continue to perpetuate a cycle where people willingly share misinformation in lieu of actually doing something useful, because clicking “like” and “share” feels like you’ve done your bit. And, frankly, by polluting social media with falsehoods, you make yourself look uninformed at best; gullible and stupid at worst.

So use a bit of common sense, will you? The next time something sounds unbelievable, it probably is; before you jump on that “Share” button, pay a quick visit to Snopes.com and look up the key points. And if Snopes.com tells you that the claims are complete rubbish, for heaven’s sake don’t just share them anyway. Educate the person you saw them from. Teach them about Snopes.com. And hopefully together we can make the world a less ignorant place.

1169: Suffering Fools

The Internet has ruined April Fools’ Day.

That’s the sentiment that seems to have been prevalent on social media for most of today. And to be fair, it has. Between Operation Rainfall’s teasing of games that will never exist (Catherine 2, The Last Story II, Theatrhythm Deus Ex) to the utterly cringeworthy press release I received earlier claiming that Doodle Jump is becoming a Broadway show (seriously, guys, 1) Doodle Jump hasn’t been relevant for several years now, and 2) try harder) it’s been a thoroughly irritating day to be online. Thankfully, a significant proportion of the press seems to have grown up a bit and is refusing to play along with these shenanigans, but there’s just as many reputable publications putting out exceedingly lame “jokes” that they really should know better than to post. The Guardian producing special liberal glasses that block Richard Littlejohn columns? Hilarious. The New Statesman rebranding entirely in Comic Sans? Oh, help me, Doctor Tendo, for my sides have split.

Thinking about it, though, I’m not sure April Fools’ Day has ever been particularly… well, fun. Sure, the stuff Google comes up with is often mildly amusing, but for the most part it seems to be a day where people think that lying as much as possible is an adequate substitute for being genuinely entertaining. That’s sort of mean when you think about it, really.

I’m trying to think back to a time before the Internet (yes, young ‘uns, we did live in such dark times once) and whether or not April Fools’ Day was fun then. I have a peculiar feeling that it wasn’t. I recall a time at school when everyone suddenly and inexplicably learned the word “gullible” simultaneously for some dark purpose, and it was a hellish few weeks of people making up outlandish stories and then jeering “HAAHAHHAAH GULLIBLE” and running away if you even looked like you were about to say “really?” April Fools’ Day is just like that, really. An opportunity for unfunny twats to be particularly unfunny twats and think they’re being Comedy Gods.

I know it’s all a bit of fun and I shouldn’t be so grumpypants about it. But as with so many things on the Internet, oversaturation leads to cynicism and active dislike. And over the last few years, we’ve seen so many painfully obvious April Fools’ Day jokes that it’s just a bit old now. By far the most laughable example was the Doodle Jump press release I mentioned earlier — that actually really made me quite cross, though I restrained myself from rebuking the sender with a tersely-worded response — but that’s far from an isolated example.

To quote my former editor Mr Jason Wilson: “Journalism isn’t about jokes. No one for a journalistic site should be making up shit. No one at a PR agency should be, either. Send me that BS and you go straight into my ‘you suck at PR’ folder.”

Quite. The news is enough of a disorganised mess in which it’s a nightmare for some stories to get noticed anyway; quit cluttering these channels up with your made-up crap. It’s not big, it’s not clever and it’s not funny.

This has been your Grouch for the day. Tomorrow I will write about something nice.